On WSJ (Wall Street Journal) CEO Council Conference in London a general manager of Darktrace, Nicole Eagan, gave an interview to journalists in which she described an interesting case of a hacker’s attack on a casino. The main subject of an interview was a safety of IoT (Internet of Things), which our London IT security service manage.
Nicole Eagan told a story how hackers stole confidential information about casino players through a thermostat located in a lobby aquarium. The malefactors used a vulnerability in the device to get inside establishment’s network. Then they found a database containing the information about the important guests, transferred it into the thermostat and then uploaded it to a personal cloud.
Today, the world appropriated more than 20 billion IoT-devices and this number grows exponentially. According to the prognosis provided by Statista, this number will reach 75 billion by 2025. Each one of these devices is a fort to defense – potential technological mistakes, software vulnerabilities, and access to the Internet make a poor combination. Experts in data security field warn that the dangers of a smart house will only multiply.
Robert Hannigan, the ex-director of British signals intelligence, noted that there are no universal security standards in IoT industry today. However, because it is yet a relatively new technology, not many are aware of the dangers and the ways of protection.